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FILM; Cinema's Lens Sees the Photographer as Lonely Voyeur

By VICKI GOLDBERG;

Published: October 11, 1992

Film makers who put still photographers on the silver screen take pleasure in spelling out what a sticky business photography is. Like as not, photographers featured in the movies will be attracted to violence, or fall into it, or even cause it. What's more, they tend to be beset by ethical problems and sexual unease. At the heart of such films lurks a suspicion that cameras can be dangerous and that those who use them, having interposed a mechanical instrument between themselves and the world, are emotionally and possibly morally limited. The movies, of course, are the offspring of stills, and children have been known to have jaundiced views of their parents.

The latest evidence is "The Public Eye," directed by Howard Franklin and opening on Friday. Joe Pesci plays a tough, live-by-his-wits news photographer in the early 1940's who is loosely modeled on Weegee, then at the height of his career. Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, was nicknamed after the Ouija board because he got to the crime so fast he was thought to have a sixth sense. More likely it was his police radio, but in the film, when the police arrive at a murder scene and find Mr. Pesci, a k a Bernzy Bernstein, already there, he dryly says he killed the guy to get the picture.

The character's -- the profession's? -- emotional limitations, substituting photographs for a lived life, are pilloried by a friend who bluntly tells Bernzy that he wouldn't be chasing dead crooks if he could express three human emotions without a camera. He is an avid collector of murders. So was the original. "I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room," Weegee wrote, "I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue."

Bernzy achieves his apotheosis when he manages to photograph a murder in progress rather than a mere corpse. He might have prevented a death or two, but witnessing murder fulfills his fondest ambitions, and he risks his life for the opportunity. This is not your everyday apotheosis, or high on most people's lists of admirable ambitions.

But photographers in motion pictures are seldom admirable characters. To begin with, they make a living -- or get their kicks -- by spying on the rest of society. That makes them easy targets for directors, who have it both ways, playing on the discomfort people feel about being watched, while at the same time teasing the audience's own voyeuristic impulses and fascination with spying.

The notion that photographers observe rather than act, watch instead of feel, comes up more than once in the movies. Photographers make near-perfect symbols of modern detachment and alienation. Even a film maker more intent on entertainment than social indictment doesn't mind tweaking viewers about their own dependence on images for their ideas of life.

Photography on screen often keeps company with violence, as if to say that seeing and watching may be inherently perilous, and an instrument that encourages voyeurism and detachment poses a threat to its users or its subjects. The lens is even more hazardous than eyesight because it is an extension of vision, recording everything and enabling the act of looking to repeat itself forever. So there are films about photographers like Bernzy, who relish the sight of murder, films about photographers who cause violence, and films about those who incorporate the camera into their crimes or psychoses.

When it comes to spying on murder, the prime text is Alfred Hitchcock's voyeuristic "Rear Window" (1954), about a photojournalist (James Stewart) who has broken a leg. Confined to a wheelchair in his apartment, he is an impotent observer. He suspects a neighbor of murder and watches him first with his eyes, then with binoculars, then through a long-focus lens, never snapping a picture but wondering if it is ethical to keep looking. To see or not to see, that is the question.

The photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" (1966) is equally incapable of commitment, and he, too, discovers a murder by snooping around. He doesn't know he has recorded a violent death until he enlarges some pictures he took in a park. There seems to be a corpse in one frame, though it looks more like an abstract painting; but the body in the next picture is unmistakable. Then, while the photographer is high on dope, his pictures are stolen, all but the one with the sweet little abstract shapes.

In Irvin Kershner's "Eyes of Laura Mars" (1978), a female fashion photographer takes pictures supercharged with sex and violence. Though not a killer, she has bizarre premonitions of terrible crimes, and her photographs drive a man to murder: he kills her associates by stabbing them in the eye, a hideous perversion of Old Testament justice. Before the film turns into psychological mashed potatoes, it makes the dangerous suggestion that violent pictures beget violent deeds.

Photography in what is known as real life does have ties to violence, particularly in war and news. Some would say everywhere. Walter Benjamin, the German essayist, wrote in 1931: "Not for nothing were pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime." In her book "On Photography," Susan Sontag said, "There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera." No wonder photographers shoot.